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Drupal has a fantastically useful feature called Multi-site - it allows you to serve many sites from a single Drupal codebase. This can greatly reduce the overhead of managing code across multiple sites, and enables great agility in launching new sites quickly.
In this article, I'll go into the detail of multi-site and try to demonstrate how it could be useful for your organisation, and in a follow up post, I'll talk about... More

Cross-posted with permission from Digital Disruption
After eight hours of panels, startup and app presentations, and a keynote by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, day 1 of Apps World North America is complete. Here are some of the highlights:
Steve Wozniak's Keynote
Right off the bat, Wozniak urged the crowd of about 8,000 to really think about what it means to be innovative. He pointed out that IBM had claimed to have been an innovative brand for 20 years, but more... More

Cross-posted with permission from Digital Disruption
SAN FRANCISCO -- What’s on the mind of, Steve Wozniak, the man who holds the patent for “microcomputer for use with video display?” Not surprisingly for the man who built the first MacIntosh computer, he’s thinking about the usability of technology, specifically wearable technology.
“Wearable tech is something that is huge today,” the personal computing pioneer who has come to be known simply as “Woz,” told me, adding, “But I think its... More

This past Sunday I was part of the Acquia team working behind the scenes to help support the GRAMMY Awards website crew, whose talented members make the GRAMMY.com experience such a success. I was on the ground at the Nokia Theater L.A. Live, getting an inside look at the GRAMMY team in action, and serving as the communications link through Google Hangout back to Acquia operations and support. The challenges of a GRAMMY Awards night are nearly unmatched as we had to ensure that the website would scale to meet incredible demand.
Whenever... More

It’s been about 3 years since the last major release of Drupal and with over 1,700 contributors who are hard at work building the next iteration, Drupal 8 will be upon us before we know it. Are you excited about Drupal 8? Here are five key features we’re very excited to get our hands on and get into the hands of our clients.
1. Manage your site’s content...from your phone.
Anyone that’s ever administered a website knows that it’s best done while using a desktop or laptop. Much of the backend functionality simply doesn’t work, or doesn’t support mobile platforms. The... More

Drupal 8 Wins: Avoiding the Dead Hook Blues, Part 3 - Today we wrap up this mini series with Larry Garfield, Kris Vanderwater, and me answering the question "Do I need to learn Symfony to develop for Drupal 8?", getting the lowdown on plugins, and doing a wrap-up on the important points from our whole, 3-part conversation.
In August 2013, I spoke with Larry Garfield and Kris Vanderwater in a 90+ minute live Hangout on Air about the origins, details, and implications of the big architectural changes... More

Cross-posted with permission from Drupalize.Me
One thing in Drupal 7 that people have a love-hate relationship with is the Features module. Features gives you the means to export database-stored site settings in code that you can put into version-control and move from server to server. In Drupal 7, when using Features to make a change to your Drupal site configuration settings, you need to update the feature or make sure the settings are in a feature and (re)create them. When deploying, you... More

As mentioned before, devops can be summarized by talking about culture, automation, monitoring metrics and sharing. Although devops is not about tooling, there are a number of open source tools out there that will be able to help you achieve your goals. Some of those tools will also enable better communication between your development and operations teams.
When we talk about Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment we need a number of tools to help us there. We need to be able to build reproducible artifacts which we can... More

This is part 1 of a 3 part series overviewing the Project QA Drupal module:
Introducing Project QA: Part 1 (Introductions)
Project QA: Writing a submodule
Project QA: With great power
You can check out the project page on Drupal.org or even see a live demo over at projectqa.nateofnine.com.
Let’s walk through building a submodule for Project QA, shall we? There’s three main steps to implementing your own extension to projectqa:
Create a fresh module
Create entities to store your data
Implement... More

Cross-posted with permission from iKOS.com
If you are working on a project with multiple developers, it's likely the topic of Continuous Integration has come up. Whilst not the academic definition, I find a useful way to describe this is the ability to completely destroy and rebuild your site without losing anything.
When you start researching this topic, you will hear about tools such as Jenkins, Puppet, Chef and various hosted services that offer similar... More

Cross-posted with permission from Genuine Interactive
Come and be a part of the 2014 Global Drupal 8 Sprint Weekend at Genuine on Saturday, Jan. 25!
Drupal 8 has been making great headway in the last few months and we’re aiming to push it further! Join us from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. to contribute to the Drupal community and help prepare Drupal 8 for beta release. Genuine and co-sponsor, Acquia, welcomes anyone who has built a site in Drupal, including non-programmers.
We’ll kick... More

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Drupal.org provides a number of pre-packaged distributions (e.g., Drupal Commons, DKAN, etc.) that allow users get a fully-featured Drupal installation up and running in no time, but maintaining an installed distribution can be tricky. You may need to juggle distribution updates with contrib module updates, core updates, and your own customizations. If you aren't careful, it can be come a maintenance nightmare!
The Drupal community has a few tools for dealing with common maintenance problems,... More

Cross-posted with permission from drupalize.me
One of the Drupal 8 initiatives that really excites me is Web Services. Drupal has never been easy to work with as a web service, but all that is about to change! In this article I am going to explore what has been going on behind the scenes with RESTful Web Services in Drupal Core and attempt to implement some working examples. After reading, you will be able to create a new node on your site via the Drupal 8 Core REST API.
Please remember that... More

It is my pride and pleasure to announce that Drupal 8 will ship with a migration path from both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. This is a first for Drupal, and is quite uncommon for most software projects. We love our elderly Drupal sites, and want them to be reborn as shiny new Drupal 8 sites.
Behind this announcement is a major technical change in how Drupal implements major version upgrades. Drupal traditionally uses its update.php page and hook_update_N() functions to update a database to the... More

It’s not just that open source enables innovation, it’s that “innovation happens first with open source.” This was the observation of Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst at North Bridge Venture Partners’ recent “Startup Secrets” event in Boston.
“Having user-driven innovation as the model means that the people with the problem are actually solving that problem, which has lead to this disruptive explosion of innovation,” Whitehurst said.
Whitehurst is spot on here, and with big brands like Twitter, Facebook and Google utilizing open source models to push better features and innovative... More

Cross-posted with permission from Drupalize.Me
It's been a while since I've sat down and tried to write a module from scratch in Drupal 8. I've dabbled here and there in the various already existing modules but there's always something interesting about just trying to write that simple "Hello World" module. Sure, starting from scratch isn't really something we do all that often, but it's nice to to know how it works.
So, as part of our... More

If you're new to Object Oriented Programming (OOP), then coding in Drupal 8 is going to feel plain weird. There's lots of new syntaxes and rules for accomplishing what seemed a lot simpler in Drupal 7. If you jump into learning OOP feeling resentful for all the weird stuff going on, then you might miss a chance at seeing the bigger picture.
There's definitely an OOP learning curve. But it's finite. Once you get to the top, you'll see a new way of coding that could actually keep you from ever coding yourself into a corner again. You know what I mean, that feeling you get where you don't want... More

People often ask, why does DevOps matter?
The honest answer to that question is...because having the development and operations team work together is the only way IT is successful.
Over the past few decades I've worked in different environments that include: small web start ups, big pharmaceutical companies, hardware engineering shops and large software companies and banks. All were trying different approaches to deliver quality software to their end users, customers, but most of them were failing badly.
Operations people were being... More

Acquia is pleased to announce the availability of Version 2.0 of the Drupal Gardens iPhone app, making it even more convenient for users on the go to manage content on their Drupal websites from the comfort of their iOS devices.
New capabilities released with Version 2.0 include:
Enhance photos before you post
When embedding a photo in post, tap to give your photos a touch of awesome before the app uploads them to your site. Sharpen focus, add filter effects, crop, change the orientation or brightness, remove red-eye and blemishes, and more! Experience the benefits of a professional photo... More

If you're a developer who has worked mostly in Drupal over the last several years and haven't come up for air and taken in the general direction of PHP application programming, you're in for an interesting ride. Many of us who developed our programming chops with Drupal have taken our cues from the Drupal codebase itself, where nearly all functionality is wrapped in functions, and where most big problems were solved in-house rather than being farmed out to third party libraries. One tendency has been to follow suit with our own code, which means that some of us have missed out one some major... More

As Dries has stated many times, Drupal is the future of the web, and distributions are critical to that future. On a CMS where speed to market is already a strength, Drupal’s distributions represent ready to use solutions for assembled digital experiences.
Today we’re excited to launch one-click distribution installations on Acquia Cloud, eliminating a barrier for non-technical site owners to try Drupal and simplifying the evaluation process for users comparing Drupal to proprietary CMS vendors. For developers and site builders, this means you now have a free way to create a live website... More

We are in the process of establishing an accessibility testing green board for Drupal. A green board will allow us to know when accessibility regressions are introduced to Drupal core as we approach the beta and release candidate stages of the Drupal 8 release cycle.
The testing platform and tests are under development and progress is solid,... More

Problem at hand!
Search is a hard thing to achieve, it really is. Let me show this by using an example of a restaurant chain that wants to add Drupal as their homepage of their whole chain. Of course, like many other organizations they do not only have Drupal running but also a subset of other web frameworks of open and closed source systems.
Now, they want Drupal to become the front-page of all that content, but would you want to migrate all of this content in Drupal just so it becomes navigable so the Drupal site could redirect all content to the right site?
If we want a generic search... More

DevOps, DevOps, DevOps … the whole world is talking about DevOps, but
what is DevOps?
Since Munich 2012, DrupalCon had a dedicated devops track. After talking to
a lot of people in Prague last month, I realized that the concept of DevOps is still very unclear to a lot of developers. To a large part of the development community, DevOps development still means folks working on 'the infrastructure part' of the development life cycle and for some it just means simply deploying Drupal, being concerned about purely keeping the site alive etc.
Obviously that's not what DevOps is about, so let's... More